How Multiethnic Kingdom Culture Defends the Truth of the Gospel
An excerpt from the forthcoming book In Church as It Is in Heaven (InterVarsity Press, 2023)
One pattern that people noticed about ancient Christian communities had to do with the way that churches embraced an astonishing range of marginalized groups of people. According to one fourth-century Christian, early churches enfolded persons from “each sex, and every kind and age” together into the same communities of discipleship. We’re convinced that God can still grow churches in multiethnic, multigenerational, and multisocioeconomic diversity today. In the words of civil rights leader John M. Perkins, “There is no institution on earth more equipped and capable of bringing transformation to the cause of reconciliation than the church.”
But remember: Christians aren’t the only ones who long to bridge the divisions that separate humanity along racial lines. There are people who have never glimpsed the glories of Christ who want it too.
What if these individuals looked at our churches and glimpsed the diverse community that their hearts yearn to see? “People need to see,” Dallas Willard once pointed out, “individuals living in daily interaction with the kingdom of the heavens.” One of the ways that the world can glimpse the kingdom of the heavens among us is by seeing a type of diversity in the church that their own theories and categories can’t explain.
What a Naturalistic Worldview Can’t Explain
That’s when some of them might begin to ask, “How is this happening? What tools are you using? And what on earth do all of these different people have in common?” If human beings are nothing more than an accidental result of the survival of the fittest, voluntarily linking our lives with people who aren’t like us is inexplicable, especially if that might mean losing some of our own social power or safety. From the perspective of naturalistic evolution, what contributes best and most to human survival is, in the words of Anthony O’Hear, “to favor kith and kin, do down our enemies, ignore the starving, and let the weakest go to the wall.” A diverse church practices precisely the opposite way of life. Communities marked by multiethnic kingdom culture strengthen the weak, turn enemies into friends, and choose a church family over physical kinship.
“Dated and Doomed”
Such diversity can only happen in its fullness on the basis of God’s work in Christ. And that’s why, when the world sees a multiethnic kingdom culture in the church, we can begin gently tilling ground that God has already prepared to bear fruit, helping these secular wonderers to see how the liturgies that have transformed our loves require a gospel that reconciles our lives.Our primary tools are the riches of the Christian faith throughout the ages, and the gospel is what we hold in common. It is through this gospel—and only through this gospel—that God has flooded our lives with a hope greater than any hope this world can possibly possess. “The gospel,” in the words of Carl F.H. Henry,
resounds with good news for the needy and oppressed. It conveys assurance that injustice, repression, exploitation, discrimination, and poverty are dated and doomed, that no one is forced to accept the crush of evil powers as finally determinative for his existence.
This confidence that God will someday end every ethnic division doesn’t mean that Christians should simply wait for God to act at the end of time. The very fact that God will act in the future provides us with a confidence that drives us to challenge every evil power even now. When that happens in a church, kingdom culture takes shape and provides a living defense of the power of God at work in his church.